“There is much work to be done rebuilding our most distressed public housing, and I am committed to making immediate and lasting change for public housing residents,” the mayor said.

That was 2007. The public housing chief was Gregg Fortner. The mayor was Gavin Newsom. The city administrator charged with coming up with new ideas was Ed Lee.

Well, we know how that turned out.

Lee helped recruit Henry Alvarez who is heading for the door after a string of Chronicle stories detailing lawsuits against him by employees, accusations of bullying, allegations he steered contracts to allies and friends, and a miserable review by federal inspectors which put the agency on the “troubled” list along with just one other in all of California.

Meanwhile, the maintenance problems highlighted shortly before Fortner’s exit appear to remain a major issue for low-income tenants who complain of broken elevators, inoperable heating systems and clogged toilets and sinks that take weeks to get repaired.

Now that Alvarez is leaving, Lee has appointed a transition team, to be led by City Administrator Naomi Kelly, to not only find a new leader for the agency but to figure out how to remake it altogether with help from private industry. (You could say I just plagiarized by own first paragraph, but it’s hard not to in this case.)

Will it be like the movie “Groundhog Day” with far more serious consequences? Or will Lee get it right this time?

“It’s strange because I’m asking the Housing Authority to consider reinventing itself and not existing the way it is,” Lee, version 2013, said. “It was hard to do in the years in which I was the city administrator and first-time mayor because the resources weren’t there.”

But now there’s money, the mayor said.

Voters in November approved a housing trust fund which, when it fully ramps up, will set aside $51 million a year in city money for affordable and middle-income housing. The mayor plans to tap into that to help redo the worst public housing developments with affordable and market rate units mixed in.

He said the city’s burgeoning economy and renewed investor confidence means private industry can also help. He said cryptically that he’s already asked “some of the most successful companies in the city” to pitch in.

Any big changes to the Housing Authority will require approval from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds the agency. Lee met recently with HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and said HUD is open to creative ideas, though it won’t be coughing up more money for standard operations.

The mayor said Donovan told him the city can apply to compete for grants to rebuild developments, which is unusual for agencies on the troubled list.

Kelly is due to report back to Lee July 1. Supervisor London Breed, who grew up in public housing; Olson Lee, director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing; and tenant activist Sara Shortt have also been tapped by the mayor to be part of the task force.

“I’m very curious to learn more details about the plan,” Shortt said. “There seems to be a lot of talk about changes, yet we still don’t know nearly enough about what the substance is.”

Whether anything pans out this time remains to be seen. We suspect, though, that everybody involved will turn out just fine.